


The Jeffreys

by Fruitjack (Qlippoth)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 19:44:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14172111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qlippoth/pseuds/Fruitjack
Summary: Cat, a geologist, hikes into a ghosttown in the wilds of Colorado that used to be known for its exotic silver lode. While spending the night at an abandoned saloon, they discover a document hastily written by an investigator a hundred years ago. The investigator had been hired by the state of Colorado to investigate a mysterious parcel of land that hadn't been paying its taxes. But when he infiltrates the "Jeffrey's" homestead he discovers a truth that 19th century man may not have been prepared for. And that horror may not have died off a century later.... (note these are drafts that I'm making public)





	The Jeffreys

**Author's Note:**

> This is the 4th draft, which dates to last year. I am now going to work on revising & finishing this piece and I'm going to that in an unusual way. I'm going to post, in sequence, the drafts as I finish them. The first 3 drafts were written by hand; I only type it into the PC when I reach the 4th draft; this has been my M.O. for years.
> 
> Words/Phrases in all uppercase are candidates for italics.
> 
> I need to insert more details to make Cat's time-frame clearer (bicentennial, 1976) - I also need details about the various radio stations active in Colorado at that time.
> 
> I don't think I need to take away from the tale he reads (that's set in the past) but I suspects parts of it need fleshing out.

"The Jeffreys" - 4th Draft, 1st Pass, April 3, 2017

Cat tumbled into the remnants of Tallas after a five hour hike through the Dominguez Canyon. He ventured past what the trial claimed to be safe - a realm punctuated by collapsed and forgotten mines. Although far, far too late to reverse course, he wondered often, and with a chuckle of sorts, if it had been such a good idea to veer so off-grid across a rare portion of Colorado at the onset of a wintry holiday season to boot.

His job at the college didn't provide enough money to finance his hobby - peculiar as it was. Yet wasn't the FIELD the GEOLOGIST'S habitat? He took advantage of weekends to wander about the state and its neighbors. Summer was the optimal choice for exploration, naturally, it wasn't always available. That left the winter and its desolation as the playground to try his skills.

His hobby started in youth - friends of his, of Ute origin, took him along into the wilds. That activity endured into adulthood even though he rarely visited that corner of the state anymore. Only recently, after a wrong turn at Ault, he discovered a new and different dimension to his leisure - haunting about ghost towns and other, abandoned works. The state, with its rocky, western terrain, proved to be ripe with that fruit.

That day's journey had been atop his list since he learned of the site through osmosis. A lecturer of Ute tribal history came to discuss folkloric aspects of his ancestor's pasts - and how their stories were connected to known scientific fact. Of interest were traditions from when the tribe was free to roam the Uncompahgre Plateau. Stories, unique to his family, were inspired by what Cat interpreted as a meteor strike whose history had been preserved orally. The strike had been a cataclysm that revealed so-called 'ant-men' as well as rich veins of silver which the Utes (then the settlers) mined to trade with Navajos and other southwestern nations. A little research into that silver uncovered the existence of a town called Tallas - that settlement's curiosities were still found at museums throughout the country even as its name didn't grace maps of the area. Navajos and, later, INDUSTRIALISTS prized the silver for its raw purity, its mixtures of isotopes, its exotic thermal properties. Both Edison and Tesla spent fortunes to obtain samples of it. Jewelry made of it was rumored to circulate among the inventors of that era.

Strolling its main street - a dry, acrid dirt that a century ago HAD BEEN its only street - it felt as if not a day passed since Tallas LIVED. As if in bits and pieces - in particulars NOT in generalities - the town was still used as somebody's home. Certainly, details obvious to the eyes - like paint fading and facade eroding - revealed its age and disrepair. It was the tiniest, subtlest aspects like intact windows and functional doors and organized interiors that bespoke its recent tenancy.

At the town's square, encased by buildings - shops, stables, jails - he asked aloud (apologetically) if he hadn't stumbled into a live John Wayne set and was due for a lot of explanation when its crew returned. Or perhaps more not less likely it was that a crew already fled for the holidays. Yes - THAT felt appropriate. Former western colonies were ripe for Hollywood's lens and the plethora of tracks throughout the dirt that weather only then started to erase lent credence to the idea of recent if transient residence.

As day approached its peak, he noted Tallas's character, a demeanor whose roughness he was rather wont to ignore when he noticed it at all. Skies were shades of gray and awake with violence of clouds clashing into clouds. Its gray birthed gusts of wind and a bitter cool clime that made his jacket feel thinner and thinner the longer he stood about. There wasn't a speck of blue since he left Grand Junction and so the memory of a pleasant hike seemed so distant as if to have been imagined. The land itself reflected the gloomy visage of deep, autumnal November - a kind of forbidden middle between the winding down of life and the vibrant snowy corpse of a winter's world. It was decay everywhere and required a rare mood to fully appreciate.

The worst part of it was the silence and how that intensified the clamor which sprung intermittently. Especially the wind's howl and arrhythmic drone it carried through Tallas. Echoes, broadcasted by the ghosts of history, reanimated the ruckus of those who had populated the colony. Wasn't that the magic of suggestion that lured Cat into such spots? Wasn't it like a dream wishing and by its will extending itself into reality with every random jittery disturbance?

Past noon, nearer the end than the beginning of that already abbreviated Thanksgiving, Cat found himself twenty miles and river away from his car.  Indeed, it was too late to embark a return after the hours he explored Tallas. Rather, he'd need to camp for the night at the ruins - a prospect he relished. To that end he scouted the perfect location - the 2nd floor of a tavern - a spot where only three generations past miners came to unwind.

The tavern's stock had been cleared save for assortments of empty snake-oil bottles. Amazingly, while the establishment had been abandoned, its array of bottles weren't smashed or tipped. Or dusty.... A few contained residue but not a scent of spirits. Tables were upright and propped by cinders in order to be half-a-foot taller. Chair were deformed in regular, consistent patterns - their arm-rests were widened or torn away - extra padding had been added to their seats to fill was usage removed. The queerest aspects were reserved for the piano at the recess of the saloon.

'Where did they get so many pianos?' he asked aloud to nobody or to everybody.

The piano's keys were exposed, yellowed, like a pirate's smile. A few - only a few - five or so were saved from dust yet suffered the stain of a grime that sported fingerprints. The 'E' of its 3rd octave was sunken and made only a clack against its frame, not a note, its cord had evidential snapped and went unrepaired.

The upstairs was abyssal but not to a lack of windows. The sky then became a single cloud wrapped around the heavens and hadn't parted even into twilight. The sinking sun gave its last primal shout but failed to penetrate the cloak as it filled the west with filtered ocre hues. Then, as it bled to death, it vanished into the earth, its light extinguished.

Cat found a chamber to roost for the night - it faced the street and its window lent its unblocked view of the sky. There he propped a lantern at a table in front of a fireplace. A chair lay scattered where it fell to pieces. He hadn't thought of fetching wood, calculating that the enclosure and the sleeper he carried would have been enough to buttress against the chill. Looking at that mess he realized more and more missing parts he came to a wild and reckless idea.

A search of the 2nd floor's labyrinth was enough to gather an ample pile of scraps certainly, hopefully to last the night. The fireplace itself was clogged by ash; it was unpleasant yet necessary to clear that away. A check of its chute revealed that its valve was only ajar. He yanked at its chain; after a century of rot it wasn't about to budge. No worry, he thought, it carried a current and, with air oozing through the structure as a whole, the chamber wasn't about to suffocate its occupant.

He lit the pile and it glowed a somber, dusky orange.

Satisfied, he barricaded the door with the chamber's extant furnishings just in case an interloper got too curious about the warmth. Signs of life (wild or otherwise) were scarce. Prey usually went about dropping hints of its presence. Predator, however, hid its existence.

Night recast Tallas's visage. Or, could it be, that its forbiddance was always present? Subdued at the fringes of awareness and revealed to the vigilance of the slumbering mind alone for it too thrived in the moments between conscious impulses. Now, without competition, its suggestions were unleashed unencumbered by the weight of reality to temper imagination's enthusiasm for spooky and entwined connections ever among the rarest of coincidences, all of which naturally portended doom.

Cat set the transistor by the lamp at the table. Signals from Grand Junction and Montrose were weak. One station from Denver cut through the static but its weather reports only INCIDENTALLY covered the western half of the state. He couldn't find a working Utah station after a careful sweep of its frequencies. He kept it tuned to Denver anyhow if just to fill the voids stimulus would have made of the silences.

As he settled to sup, a gust rustled the window and as it surged through the fireplace for a spell it sparked a crackling, glowing life into the pile of wood he lit. The remnants of chairs burn and so beat an unsteady light to equal the day then, at the wake of the stir, resumed its umber-like luster, dusty with patches of ash that hadn't been present before. It was then, just then, as he stared at the fire, that an object loosened and dropped free of the chute's valve - it must have been what jammed it all that while.

Instantly, he poked it free of the pile with a stick. It wasn't inflamed and his act save it from further damage. By its shape it resembled a leathery wrapped docket, rectangular and thick, oily with tar from ages of absorbing smoke. A buckle kept its lid shut so well that it couldn't be opened save for a knife to cut around the fabric.

Inside, he found a trove of curiosities. Chief among them a trinket like a pendant - it wasn't hot to the touch in spite of its metalicity. he lay it aside where it soaked the fire's light. His layman eyes came to a southwestern conclusion for its origin. Navajo? Zuni? Although its silversmithing resembled that of their artisans, its design bore a distinctly futuristic pattern not associated with jewelry. Indeed, its arrangement of stones amid networks of filaments, while colorful and delicate like jewelry, gave the impression of circuitry. Its gems sparkled as though their interiors contained microcosms of the universe. The air about its threads of silver exuded a scent like ozone - the filaments, connecting together jewel to jewel, driven by a source unknown someway, somehow ionized the air.

The remainder of his discovery amounted to a bundle of maps and documents. They were composed of loose sheets thoroughly written onto and browned crisp due to how it had been stored. It survived and remarkably intact. Cat spent only a blip of effort to organize the jumble that had been shoved haphazardly into that docket. By the lantern, transplanted onto the floor, he struggled to read the hand. Its strokes were steady not unlike the cursive he had been taught. It was the ink's loss of color that made their contents a chore to unravel.

The text didn't appear to start or stop formally anywhere, Rather, it appeared to be a section ripped out of a large journal. Nevertheless:

"... a fact I suspected but could not prove until ... is that we are not safe at Tallas. IT IS NOT OURS. It's a town that already existed before settlement shifted west, before EVEN before the Indians came into the plateau. The region's True Power felt content to let us occupy Tallas for reasons only THEIR mind comprehended. Now ... it is a refuge for their discarded and THEY are not happy....

"I need to inform the Commissioner of my survey but with my horse lost and I at the mercy of these ... forces? ... these, my last few pages, suffice as my testament. Tallas FEELS tiny considering its mines (known and unknown) and its flow of wealth in and out, all of which are concealed by the roughness of the plateau and the machinations of the Parcel I was sent to investigate. Its economic vitality - as gauged by its POPULATION - is seemingly disconnected and unaware of the site's purpose. The Commissioner was right to suspect the possibility of untaxed revenue generated by the Jeffrey's but neither he nor the state nor any, earthly power will succeed to extract even a penny of what is due the state of Colorado.

"The Commissioner provided a dossier - which had been compiled piecemeal by other researchers the county hired. It was my wish to interview my predecessors as part of my venture but leads into their whereabouts dried at Tallas - their last known residences - and few talk about anything beyond their complaints. What I find is that the town is only partially involved with the mines and bear little if any information about the Parcel. A large portion of the settlement is populated by brutes who all prefer to avoid. These brutes were difficult to fathom; their features such as were visible didn't strike as American or Indian typical of the population. Rather, they felt like they were transplants from Eastern Europe or Asia. Physically, they are large with unusual proportions. Their eyes, too, were unique enough to make their origins baffling. The townsfolk didn't know what to make of them except that as far anybody recalled THEY were always at Tallas.

"I posited that their prevalence and their habit for odd jobs thereabout revealed that THEY are Tallas's originators and maintainers. Indians and Settlers alike merely latched onto the crumbs they left - and that included, perhaps, the throughput of the mines. Of the mines that were known to the townsfolk - I inspected all of them as my predecessors were thought to have - I made a far, far more thorough investigation as mines were my forte. The mines were already ancient and depleted by the onset of settlement. Their modest output corroborated that who or what ever began them took what they required and left them abandoned. Neither the Utes nor any other tribe of the region were known to mine at such industrial scales. Strangest, still, was the manner of construction which no doubt my predecessors overlooked due to their lack of familiarity. The prime shafts were not buttressed by engineering standards known to man from antiquity. They shared commonality with hives. They exhibited hexagonal structures of uncanny symmetry.

"Now, even as I write, understand that while the head of the snake excised itself so to speak, the danger it represented is not yet past. It may be WORSE as the danger can not be controlled anymore. Without the benefit of the region's True Power to curtain the fearsome prowess our status is imperilled unless a manner to curtail or route them is discovered. For the while they are free and although the appear like creatures of habit, they may not confine themselves to the region anymore.

"The Jeffreys traded exclusively with a particular band of Utes that other Indian tribes were suspect of. Via that exclusivity wares produced by the Parcel travelled freely from tribe to tribe southwest. Tallas popped into existence to serve as a more permanent, less conspicuous post to trade with passersby.

"The survey from 1856, which is purported to be that of the Jeffrey's homestead, is not ENTIRELY incorrect. Putting aside questions of that Parcel's pedigree, it had been abutted to known Ute territories in spite of the fact that none of the signatory chiefs professed its existence or annexation. The claimed only that the Parcel's inhabitants were neighbors with whom they enjoyed a longstanding, mutual trade as well as other 'exchanges' that I took to interpret as carnal. Apparently the trade extended into the era of Spanish Possession; enough then to make the Jeffrey's homestead among the oldest European families to have settled the west OR so we were intended to believe.

"Despite their ancient residency and relations, few were aware of the Jeffrey's existence. The county itself only stumbled onto their presence indirectly when they reviewed treaties prior to statehood.For all anybody surmised, the Jeffreys were a family, vast in number, with connections about the southwest and seemingly exiled into a Parcel of a few thousand acres.

"What if the domicile were older still? What if their origins were not clouded by their assumed appellation? Nothing akin to that Parcel existed on-record prior to 1856. Treaties finalized at the end of the decade demarcated it simply as the Jeffrey's Homestead and added that survey to cement the claims of its boundaries.

"I return, again and again, to the survey. Roused by its inconsistencies, there remained enough truth to its design that it felt legitimate. Except - the surveyors were not identified, dates were not recorded - 1856 was a guess. Nobody was aware of surveyors at work so deep into Colorado territory. What they measured and the units they used to measure were not standard anyhow. The values themselves were added by another hand after the map was produced. While there is a wealth of elevation data, the other sundry indicators to my eyes were added deliberately to overwhelm a layman. Topographically, via cursory inspection demonstrated that the map did not match the demarcated boundary of the Parcel. A hill stood a few miles interior tall enough to be seen at a distance does not appear at the chart. The Commissioner suspected that the map's irregularities were a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the source of a lode responsible for their riches - and influences. I say that was true and that in addition to that there was yet another reason too fantastical to utter.

"My mind filled with questions Tallas was not capable of answering.

"I am not an unreasonable man, prone to fits of fancy. I was a scientist before I gave myself to this field of detection. I say curiosity mounted and without an outlet to resolve the paradoxes, I was left to gather facts for myself. Exhausting the town's settler's, I interviewed a few Ute elders who frequented the posts. Through our mutual understanding of the Spanish, my efforts to probe them about the Jeffreys met with diversions I recognized as elevations. The only concrete facts to report were that a rather straightforward network of trade extended from the Parcel, through the southwestern tribes, to the Aztecs and possibly to points further away. Trade flowed down and up stream past boundaries and bulk of it involved silver and gemstones - crystals that I knew not to be native to America were coming through the Jeffreys and returning into the Parcel. Ostensibly, it was made to look like jewelry, from what I gathered the materials and the designs were provided and the artisans followed the order.

"I made an attempt to speak to the brutes at Tallas - effort after effort failed. I shudder to devote a greater allot of words to describe the ordeals I put myself into. I wondered after a while if they were aware of me. Perhaps my insignificance may yet spare me their wrath? Already this town is strikingly and unnaturally deserted. Frustrated, I turned my attention to the Parcel itself.

"Ixotiz...."

No - Cat flipped onto a page comprised of two sheets that latched onto each other as if by glue. It was out of sequence. At the other side of that sheet he discovered a stave that contained a tune's notes. The work's author claimed the music was dominated by octaves of 'E'.

Cat leaned against the table - it hadn't been propped by cinders. He bit into a sandwich as the radio pushed static. So much for Denver's weather. At a whim he turned off the radio then left that by the lamp.

"I found a trail into the known southern perimeter of the Parcel. At the onset I noted an encampment. Were they Utes? I, myself, camped at the hinterland and kept as invisible as geography allowed. The Indians were busy with activity and their ruckus, too, assisted my efforts to hide. I watched and waited, taking note of what I saw and becoming increasingly suspicious of their motives, hypocritical as that might have been. I suspected those were the band of Utes who shared a connection to the Jeffreys. I cannot say for certain but their expressions of cultures were unlike what I knew of the Utes proper.

"On the third day of my vigil, I grew bold enough to make contact with riders from the camp. Together we approached a gate through which I assumed trade flowed to and from the Parcel. My contact with the riders was brief and uninformative due to a lack of communication. Signs that I knew to be Ute simply did not produce the effect I expected. About the only excitement to speak of came from a burst of activity at the other side of the gate - a pair of brutes appeared astride junipers that they dwarfed if not in height then in construction. Their arrival agitated the riders and left me unsettled.

"The brutes were dressed awkwardly with fashions larger than their already exaggerated frames suggested. Their faces were enshadowed by hats and I could not read their expressions beyond the stab of their eyes. When their hands escaped their pockets I noted the slender almost deformed character of their extremities. Their joints appeared arthritic yet I surmised their posture was a deliberate attempt to hide a truer facet of their being. I was baffled by them and so oppressed at their appearance that I failed to note the riders fled and left me to stand alone at the gate.

"The very next day - to my astonishment - there had been enacted a material alteration to that side of the Parcel. In the middle of the night the Utes shifted their activity by a dozen miles to a spot north, northwest nudging themselves into invisibility between the zigzag rims of a gentle canyon. I cannot say if the act was due to their ways or to my intrusion only that it was accomplished precisely in order to be out of view. The trail and its terminus at the gate were stifled and rendered innavigable. I left the horse at my camp. Thus, on foot, I penetrated the Parcel with the goal to explore it as far as safety allowed.

"I say, again, I am not a daydreamer. I write with the fortitude of sobriety. The instant I crossed the gate's threshold I was arrested by the stir of the wind. A cool burst of air, like the ozone of a bolt, exploded into my face. The sky was blue and the sun cast its light upon the earth yet in spite of summer I felt a wintry omniscience. I felt, too, like a trespasser caught. They knew of my intrusion and the disturbances that engulfed me became the alarm that followed my steps. I was watched, studied.... Is that why they let me come so near? I wonder, even now, now as I write, with the weight of the world at my shoulders, I wonder what they wanted from me.

"Miles into the Parcel, the junipers and their cover melted away into a sandy field. Just by the look of it compared to the environment that encompassed it I understood that area was artificial. It was too flat and its dimensions too rectangular to be a creature of nature. Men, or their like, constructed that sandy field for reasons entirely and uniquely their own.

"Just to be certain of it, I unfolded my copy of the survey. Already I noted discrepancy.  The land as it existed spread flatly while the survey displayed a rough, rugged terrain. There was yet another issue whose discovery vexed me: at the eastern end of that sandy field the land dipped into a valley like a canyon. It wasn't deeper than fifty feet; its walls were wide and steep like a 'V'; its facades were cut - no - smoothed as if its substance had been heated into obsidian. This feature could have been mistaken for a dry river bed if not for its steep walls, their symmetry, and their straight forward path. The sides of the canyon mirrored each other perfectly and did not meander through its length as it worked north, northwest. Although I could not gaze it completely, where the valley terminated, there appeared to be a hill that was built more like a conglomerate of debris pushed into a mound than a visage sculpted by weather. The whole entire appearance of that valley and that hill felt connected to a single event that generated both. It was as if something heretofore unseen carved the valley and formed the hill out of the debris.

"I kept to the valley's western rim which sported a forest.

"Nearing the hill, whose grizzly features and unsteady stature I struggled to keep out of sight, I spotted a familiar hexagonal aperture at the opposite side of the valley. Out of it echoed a tune. The Ute camp played it earlier when last I saw it. Then there came the flickering, swaying lights through the aperture. Their bearers lurched to the surface. Then the tune became more and more distinct - I heard voices, words speaking a language that I could not fathom. I panicked as the reality of my capture became tangible. It was a spur of activity and in reply to that I retreated into the woods as I kept to the earth. True - there was activity - it was not a rush to fetch me - it was, perhaps, the simple act of one shift replacing another shift.

"Of the things that came out of that hole, I quake even now to write what I saw. Not simply for the shadow and the darkness that then obfuscated the valley but because my mind itself so conspires to crush the memory of it. The bodies could have fooled anybody to suppose they were men - but without the padding and the shapeshifting even the largess of their clothes provided, naked as they were, there was no place to hide the anomalies. The limbs were longer, thinner and curled as if extended they might have doubled their stature. Their arms were joined to broad and straight shoulders whose backs splayed a kind of triangular frame. Their legs branched out of a point where an abdomen ought to be. I would have mistook them for malnourished were it not for their torsos which gripped together the bulk of their corpulence. Their heads, though, gave such a shock that I fear my words cannot capture their features. Faces were recognizable and distinct from figure to figure, that much I am free to claim without a struggle. It was only in the periphery of aspects that anything remotely human could be gauged. These were the brutes, the closest, nearest, the most intimate with the Parcel - where they the family? The Jeffreys?"

Cat set the sheets aside. The tale's disquiet was tempered by the century of its writ and the struggle to read its hand. It was near time to quit anyway - if he still entertained the notion of an early morning hike to the car. The trail through the canyon was arduous; already his body ached. If he were lucky, a good night's rest might restore his strength.

He spread the blanket and punched the pillow - then flung a cord of wood into the fireplace. Gazing at the window, he caught the sparkle of snowflakes dropping and hitting against panes. For a while the night faded into the recess of consciousness. He lay neither in nor out of his senses only grayed as it were into a monotony through which any sort of activity could be imagined. He thought he heard music but its rhythm had to do with the atmosphere, certainly....

"It wasn't until sunset that I felt comfortable enough to slither out of my cover. I knew they - the brutes - were still working either above or below the ground. It was necessary to be silent. As I started my crawl toward the sandy field, I realized, my position at the valley's rim lent me a vantage over that spot - and advantage required in order to cross undetected. To my dread, fires had been lit throughout the sandy field. Amid their flicker silhouettes revelled. The Ute encampment or a portion of it shifted onto that spot and I caught them at the apex of a ceremony. It wasn't anything akin to the drumming and vocalizing I came to expect from gatherings (again, I say....) This ceremony, no doubt, was due to the Jeffreys and expressed aspects of their culture. The event resonated with that tune; I could not say what the words were, if they were, if they were anything at all. Perhaps it was not the words but the tune that mattered? I cannot get its melody out of my mind; jotting its notes only make it too real.

"The tribe's intrusion into my intrusion left me perplexed as to how to exit the Parcel. I plotted then to crawl down then up the valley - until I spotted a pool of those brutes gathered at the rift's mouth where in the shadow and the darkness distance provided they stood as audience to the revelry. Simply - I could not venture through that and evade detection. So it came to be that the only route out of the Parcel was through it - north, north east, past the hill, past the river that side of the plateau."

Against the floor, where he intended to sleep, Cat stopped - stopped moving even breathing. The only sounds to reach his ears came from the flickers of flames and the patters of snowflakes against panes. Just the same he became alert to a disturbance. A music - dulled and muffled by distance - a singular melodic sprawl repeated verbatim except for flourishes and adornments. What unsettled the mind was how lilted it felt; as if a piece of the tune were missing.

'Damn the static', he thought.

A creak - wasn't that somebody lurking about the tavern? That air bleeding between the floorboards - weren't they voices deep into a discussion? The void of night - wasn't it just a canvas or appropriately a mirror to reflect the psyche's underbelly? Such as it was, ghost towns were haunted because people made them so.

"Farthest from the ceremony I felt spared from detection yet I could not shake the sense I stumbled into a realm men were not permitted to venture. I should not have been shocked that I found the hill resonant with a kind of life, the cause of its vivacity was not yet revealed to my senses. As I surmised, it was not a hill only a conglomerate shaped by a surge of violence. It was the debris pushed out of the valley by the event that created it. I noted now more than then the totality of its artificiality. Worse was to come as there remained yet another facet of its construction that only proximity revealed.

"A rectangular protuberance jetted from the base of the hill. Jetted as if it were lodged and I should be direct that it slanted, its right edge above its left edge by no greater than 45 degrees. The protuberance itself stuck out of the hill by a hundred feet and no doubt to remain perched it must have extended far, far further than that into the rubble. It was the hill's weight, then, that kept the object steady else gravity would have yanked it free into the valley. At that juncture, under that object, the valley was not smooth or vertical as it was elsewhere, rather, it bore the hallmarks of having been excavated by hand from the interior of the hill in the manner of an insect's mound.

"What I saw of the object's surface gave the impression of the rugged. Its form was metallic and accessorized like a locomotive - pipes, valves, dials, and hatches - all of it were present and indicated a fantastic industry the like of which intimated the impossible. I was tempted to flee at the sight of its immensity but a flicker of curiosity took the better of me. Hadn't I been watched since I entered the Parcel? At any time I could have been stopped yet I was allowed to venture so far for reasons I could not fathom. As if to further tempt my curiosity, I found that a hatch had been left ajar at just the spot where entry would have been a simple enough matter. I found that it conformed to my dimensions and permitted to pass through it unencumbered. So I ventured into the object.

"It was the deep yet vivid azure that struck me. There was light - neither from a candle nor a bulb - and from whence it came I could not say only that its source must have been ahead, further ahead. Through that stretch of tunnel I trespassed I heard the hum that drew me to hill's life and instantly I recognized it as the hum of a dynamo. Due to the angle and the dearth of features to grasp at, my ascent through that tunnel was not easy. I persisted and reached a junction where it terminated into a chamber cut to modest proportions. Apertures at its walls, floor and ceiling, promised to lead further into the object's interior but the angle were such that exploration would be impossible with the interference of gravity.

"It was there that I noted where the azure originated.

"Its walls were covered by panels - most were smooth, glassy, and cool to the touch. A few were jagged and touched by fire where they had been shattered. A majority lent the impression they had been repaired with their gaps filled by what looked like ... the jewelry. The jewelry not unlike what the Indians produced with gemstones and silver. The work, all of it, original and patchwork possessed a modularity at once industrial and organic. Inspecting the panels with my limited resources, I found the work they contained amazingly complex. Their whole, entire natures were electrical but the character betrayed engineering at a level beyond our capacity. The lights came from the components of the panels. The patchwork especially vibrated - perhaps - a side effect of their construction which the vessel tolerated. I reached to a panel just at the periphery of my grasp. With the tips of my fingers I dislodged the trinket from its socket. It fell into my hand with a spark that coaxed my scream.

"Or was my scream impelled by something I do not altogether recall? I cannot shake the sense - yes - the sense animated by my mind as I sit to write and sort this event - that I was aboard that object for longer than my coherent memory admits. There were other moments that now, due to time, due to exhaustion, recede from even the realm of impressions. At a certain juncture whose location within that object I am not certain of I know I talked to somebody - a sentience which replied to my inquiry. I am certain, too, of vistas ... of experiences that once felt intense and now crumble like a dream. Only the sight of myself reaching, grasping, and breaking that trinket from its panel is solid. It gave a puff of smoke - more spark than smoke. I slipped, then, straight through the passage and the hatch into which I entered.

"I tumbled onto a ledge. From the valley, a mob of brutes approached with torches. Amid the enormity of the hill and the object lodged into it, wasn't I too irrelevant a target? Crawling about the growth, running from danger to danger that materialized to my senses as I retreated, against my will I froze then rooted myself into the ground at a rumble that issued out of that visage. Even at my distance I saw and felt it tremble. I watched as the face of the hill split and avalanched sheet by sheet its innards into the valley. A cloud like fog spread far and wide yet through its cloak the object glowed that azure.

"I screamed at the fear of the sight. What other response but fear it should have inspired? The reality of how it rolled side to side with the quality of an animal took my breath away as much as the violent destruction of that hillside. I was not prepared to grasp the sight. It was a machine whose motions came with the agility of the living. It shook itself clear of the hill that entombed it and by so doing destroyed that mound.

"As that ghastly visage filled the sky above, the ground below resonated to yet another terror. The brutes who spilt out of their mines and filled the valley in front of what used to be the hill started to climb like insects, climbing and grasping, reaching yet failing to stack themselves far enough to stop the object. Their voices echoed syllables - tiaz - queh - tia hueh - tia hue - ixotiz! - their words magnified their futility into a pained and desperate harmony.

"The object - what could it be but a craft? - exposed itself to be larger than what I suspected. As it yanked itself completely free the hill imploded then vomited its innards onto the hoard of brutes. I could not help but feel as I watched the hill collapse, the way its scree flowed into the valley, the way it avalanche crested and shattered like foam onto a beach, the way it filled then erased the valley with fluid like efficiency, was it not intentional?

"The valley refilled and vanished under a rocky scar. The brutes were neither seen nor heard, drowned as it were by the violence. All that remained was the azure of the object which itself began to fade out of sight amid a cloud that engulfed it. With a flash that rivalled daylight, it was gone.... the hum was gone ... it was all gone.

"I lack the coherent memory of what followed. I took cover under junipers. I recall, as I hid, fleeting glimpses of Indians coming and going or inspecting that rocky scar where the valley used to be. From what I gathered their expressions were a mix of emotions, elated yet touched by melancholy. They left me alone to the dust as it rained as if I were invisible, less than a cog in the wheel of what transpired that night.

"The sun crept free of the horizon and I felt a chill blanket my body. Yet I wouldn't leave until I heard the solitude of the earth again. I wanted to believe what I survived - what I witnessed - was fantasy and that the empty slate of morning held the promise that my wish would be, could be true. As I retraced my steps through the Parcel - which felt dead to the core, its eyes upon me extinguished - I was awed at how its peculiarities were erased, nevertheless, I became aware that it did not go as the Jeffreys planned. Had my intrusion effects I neither realized nor fathomed? I shuddered both at the savagery and at my helplessness in the midst of it. And because ... because ... if they were capable of such indifference, what chance did he have? We take comfort that advancement tempers us as a race, that improvement and progress, our mastery over the world such as it is, will usher a vast era of prosperity and enlightenment. What if the opposite were true? Or if one did not necessitate the other? If those who already possessed such power were no better than us, indeed, what terror is yet to be unleashed by man himself?

"What could I do about it? Those devils! Blotted as if by shame by those who created them for their own ends.

"I returned to Tallas and found it this way, I've waited days. Humans, at least, are not returning."

Cat flipped the sheet - it was the last of the bundle - I FOUND IT THIS WAY?

"The brutes weren't all wiped - certainly - not all of them. Maybe the originals, those stranded for centuries about the craft - maybe they, the Jeffreys, left. But not the chimeras they devised. Those brutes, whose sole existence was to work, were they accidents or necessities? Employed thus to exert their master's will upon the world just long enough for man's skill to sharpen to the level they required? The wait must have been centuries! For while the artisans bore the skills, the societies lacked the industries to automate the repair of their craft. When at last humanity advanced and inadvertently assisted their efforts, they fled, erasing their occupation. But I say to you, you who find this, I say they did not all die that night. I heard them chant and cry IXOTIZ under the rubble that filled the valley. I waited and waited for hours but the cries would not cease. Their bodies were simply not human enough to kill so easily. They haven't yet found me but they search, as they crawl out of their mines, they search. For me? For US? If I do not haste ... it should be but for a matter of time...."

That was all of it.

Cat fumbled the documents back into the docket with the trinket that appeared to have exhausted its life. He was tired, too, and a touch delirious. He sat against the table with the lamp and the radio by his side. The fire's light was a dusky, abyssal orange. Another scrap of wood? he thought - and it came to be that his mind was increasingly paralyzed by a sound it heard. A stilted, broken melody. A sequence of tones interrupted as if there were a part of it missing. He thought the quality of the reception was compromised by the weather. Clearly, it was way, way past the hours of Denver's broadcast.

Cat reached for the speaker and his blood froze - didn't he recall? - the radio, it was already off.


End file.
